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Mary and the divine inversion

Mary and the divine inversion

Last updated on: December 20, 2016 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Mary and the divine inversion 2016-12-19T22:04:57-05:00 Gene Veith

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In discussing why the Virgin Birth of Christ is important, James A. Rogers (Texas A&M professor and LCMS member) cites Mary as an example of the “divine inversion.” That is, the way God turns upside down what we would expect. This theme, which Mary herself celebrates in the Magnificat, runs throughout the Bible, culminating in the Cross. Here is how Prof. Rogers concludes his reflections:

The Virgin Birth, like the Cross itself, confounds what we think we know; it confounds our belief that power, whether human power or the brute force of nature, prevails in the world. . . .A virgin giving birth. A king—the King—lying in a manger. A dead God on a stick. These, along with the many other inversions in the Bible, both big and small, promise the possibility of a different world, a world in which God inverts the natural order of things, including the natural of the human world.

From James A. Rogers, The Divine Inversion | First Things:

Mary gets more attention than usual this time of year, at least in Protestant churches. But Richard A. Shenk points out in his new book, The Virgin Birth of Christ: The Rich Meaning of a Biblical Truth, that in Evangelical churches, the why of the virgin birth receives less attention than the fact of it. This, despite the fact that the Virgin Birth was one of the “Five Fundamentals” of the twentieth century’s modernist/fundamentalist debates. In response, Shenk, a pastor and seminary professor, focuses his short volume on the whys and wherefores.

Shenk considers how Jesus’s birth by the Virgin Mary helps to reveal his “full humanity” and “full divinity”; how it counteracts inclinations toward full-blown naturalism; how it provides one solution to the puzzle of the bestowal of the Kingdom upon Jesus in light of Jeremiah’s pronouncement against Jehoiachin’s seed ever sitting on David’s throne; and how it heralds a new creation.

What ties together Shenk’s different arguments is what I call the divine inversion—the many ways in which God acts contrary not merely to physical nature, but to what humans take to be the natural order of things in the social and political world. God inverts natural orders, both human and physical, to reveal that it is God himself who acts.

In the Magnificat, Mary exalts God for her miraculous pregnancy, but the implications expand. Reminiscent of Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel, the Magnificat proceeds from the inversion of ordinary physical processes in Mary’s miraculous conception to the inversion of the natural political and social world:

[Keep reading. . .]

Painting of the Virgin Mary by Fra Angelico: The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

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